


a little ocean

by calico_fiction



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bed-Wetting, Bloodbending (Avatar), Bodily Fluids, Canon Compliant, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Missing Scene, Nightmares, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Situational Humiliation, Waterbending & Waterbenders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24714580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calico_fiction/pseuds/calico_fiction
Summary: Zuko has a nightmare under the full moon and Katara's watchful eye.
Relationships: Katara & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 157





	a little ocean

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning** Katara uses her bending to 'see' Zuko more intimately than would otherwise be possible, without permission and while he's asleep. It's entirely non-sexual and she doesn't do anything to him, but it is a little creepy.
> 
> Title from Pool by Paramore.
> 
> Set between Boiling Rock and Southern Raiders.

The full moon comes and Katara can't sleep. Even sequestered away from the moonlight inside the Western Air Temple, the energy of it flows under her skin like white rapids. She'd be surprised that Aang can obviously sleep just fine, his soft snores sending up tiny whirlwinds, but no doubt he's tired from firebending training with Zuko. Zuko, who no longer slinks away to his room alone at night ever since he and Sokka came back from their little field trip and Sokka wouldn't stop fawning all over him until they both dropped where they sat. It seems like Katara is the only one left he hasn't gotten to yet. It's not that Katara isn't grateful to have her father back. Of course she is. But one good deed can't measure up to a lifetime of evil.

Dad is sleeping around the embers with them again tonight, along with Suki snuggled up to Sokka's side, while the Fire Nation prisoner they had broken out had chosen a room for himself instead. Under the power of the moon Katara can feel the warmth of their blood; its quiet, contained flow through their bodies allows her to be aware of their presence more viscerally than she could have in the day, or on any other night.

She can feel the blood in Zuko's body too, a little warmer than everyone else's. She has the brief, dark thought that she could do something with it and he couldn't even try to stop her. She won't do it of course, that's not the person she wants to be. But she can _think_ about it all she wants. She closes her eyes and focuses on that too-warm body and just _feels,_ feels the power she has over him in this moment, how little of a threat he is to her and everyone here that she loves - how little he is because, this time, she's bigger.

Katara sits there like that for more than an hour, letting Zuko's blood rush in her ears, feeling his energy at the tips of her fingers. Slowly her rage simmers down and she falls into a meditation, with Zuko's circulation serving as her focus the way any river might. She senses his every movement, how his chest expands with each breath, the beat of his heart, the slosh of the fluids in his organs that means he's alive.

Such as it is that Katara feels Zuko's throat move before she hears him whimper. The sound is enough to break her from her trance, but she stays focused in on his body. For a split second she panics, thinking she accidentally bended him after all and hurt him while he was asleep. Quickly she realizes, to her relief, that he's just having a dream. A bad one, it seems like.

Curious now, Katara takes in what details of Zuko's dream that she can glean from the outside - or rather, from the very specific insides that she has the power to observe. He's remarkably still and quiet as compared to how she and Sokka and Aang tend to be during their nightmares. But he swallows convulsively and his heart _pounds,_ his fingers clenching into fists inside his sleeping bag. He whimpers again and presses himself hard into the ground, trying to cringe away from whatever is plaguing his mind. Katara can feel herself getting soft over him, pitying him, and she doesn't want to. She considers waking him up in some ungentle way - he'll be rough and angry awake, angrier from embarrassment for dreaming in front of her, and remind her who he is. She pulls her water pouch from her things, preparing to give him a little whip on the back of his neck.

"No," he begs in his sleep. He curls up, and Katara senses the density of the water of him change as he scrunches himself up into a tight ball, as small as he can go. She hesitates, half from a wretched twinge in her heart and half again from curiosity. Even with all his prostrating, and with the not insignificant number of times that Katara has beat him in a fight, Katara has still never seen Zuko like this before - small and scared and openly hurt. She wants to know more, and doesn't. She wants her heart to be hard against him, and doesn't. She hesitates too long.

"No," Zuko whimpers again. And then - "No, please. M'sorry, Dad, please..." Katara's breath catches in her throat. Zuko has never called Ozai "Dad" in all the time she's known him. If he called him anything other than "the Firelord" it was "my father". Never something so intimate, so real and vulnerable, as "Dad". It forces her to think of him - to think of both of them - differently. Ozai is Zuko's dad. Katara looks over at her own dad, peacefully sleeping across the firepit. What would her life be like if he was the kind of man Ozai is? What would she be like if he had done something to her that would make her beg him for mercy in her sleep?

Zuko cries out softly, a broken and breathless exclamation of remembered pain. The sound makes Katara flinch. She closes her eyes again, wanting to hide from this now. This thing that is so much uglier and scarier than she thought it would be when she started watching. She turns her head away, pulls back her focus as much as she can. But she can't ignore him fully, not with the power of the moon flowing through her, with the heat and movement of him that makes him stand out from the others. She can't help but notice when the water in his body moves again, a small release of pressure- Oh.

It only takes him seconds to wake up, after, and then seconds more to calm from the nightmare enough to notice. He moans quietly, humiliated before he even knows he has an audience. He gasps wet little hitched breaths into his pillow for a few moments before he drags himself out of his sleeping bag and begins to gather the bedding up. He moves efficiently, and he looks so beaten down, Katara realizes instantly that he's done this many times before. _How many times?_ she wonders uncomfortably. How many times has this Prince woken up in a wet bed in the middle of the night and shamefully taken care of it himself before anyone else could know?

"Let me-" Katara blurts without thinking it through. Zuko jumps nearly a foot and then whirls to face her, hiding his soiled bedding behind himself. He seems to remember a second later that he's all but put the wet spot at the front of his sleep pants on display. He glances down at himself and a tortured noise writhes out of the back of his throat. His bedding drops from his hands and he sinks to his knees as if every ounce of strength has left him, and he's so hot with humiliation now that he's actually steaming. Unwillingly, Katara senses the water gathering in his good eye. He tries to hide behind his hair, but it's not long enough.

"Just-" she stutters. "There's not a creek nearby to wash it in." It's true, but still something of an excuse, so Katara hurries past it before Zuko can respond - if he even would. She's never bended urine before, but it's just the same as any other water, and certainly easier than it would be if it was still inside of his body. She pulls it out of the fabric of his sleeping bag and his pants, gathers it all into a hovering ball. It just looks like water in the blue tint of the dark hardly touched by moonlight. Zuko cringes and folds down to rest his forehead on the ground, still steaming. Such a tiny amount of liquid to have caused him such grief; not even a palmful. Katara sends it away with one negligent flick of her wrist.

"There," she says. She keeps her voice low and quiet, but doesn't bother to soften it. She figures that Zuko, like Toph, wouldn't take well to a touch too gentle. "There's probably still a salt residue, but it's clean enough to sleep in." Zuko makes a strangled noise into the ground. The steam off of him increases briefly, a humid cloud, before it cuts off abruptly in a way Katara can tell it must have been purposeful. Zuko puts his hands flat on the floor, fingertip to fingertip over his head, transforming his fetal position into a bow.

"Thank you," he rasps. And then without lifting his head he crawls back into his sleeping bag where it lays, crumpled and out of place, and hides from her as much as he can without actually running away. Katara lets him, lets him pretend he's actually gone back to sleep, will let him pretend in the morning that this never happened. She refocuses her attention on her dad as much as she can, despite the draw of Zuko's differences. She lulls herself with the slow and steady shush and thrum of her father, alive, and quietly heals a weeks-old injury in his side that he hadn't told them about without needing to move closer.

Katara is still glad not to be smaller than Zuko anymore, still fully prepared - maybe eager - to wield her power if she needs to. But, she has to admit, if only to herself alone in the dark...

Maybe Zuko never was actually that big after all.


End file.
